One of the major improvements is the debut of a dual-bay unit, the Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay, which houses two standard hard drives on the inside. This means you now have the option of using RAID 1 to protect data against the case of the drive's fail (default). Alternatively, you can also combine two drives into a single volume to maximize the storage space.

There's also a single-volume version called Seagate Personal Cloud that has just one internal drive on the inside. Both new servers have a new design that allows you to easily replace or install the internal hard drives yourself, however.

The second major improvement is a built-in app manager that lets you install additional features, including WordPress, BitTorrent Sync and ElephantDrive. Seagate has also created a software development kit (SDK) for its app manager to allow third-party developers to create new applications for the servers.

You can easily replace the internal hard drives of the new Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay.
Dong Ngo/CNET

Apart from hosting shared data, Seagate says you can easily stream content from the new servers to smartphones, set-top boxes, tablets, PCs or TVs via the Seagate Media app. When used with the Seagate Mobile Backup app and Dashboard software, the server can also work as the central backup destination for both computers and iOS or Android mobile devices.

According to Seagate, the new servers support all LG and Samsung smart TVs and Blu-ray players from 2012 or later. They also support popular streaming media players, including Roku, Google Chromecast and Apple TV. On top of that, all standard DLNA-based devices are also supported.

Apart from being a backup destination, the new servers can also backup its content to online services including Amazon S3, Box, Baidu, DropBox, Google Drive, HiDrive and Yandex.Disk. They also have a synchronization option that works with Baidu, DropBox and Google Drive.

Both the Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay and the Seagate Personal Cloud are set to ship later this month. The former will come in 4TB, 6TB and 8TB capacities while the latter will be available in 3TB, 4TB, and 5TB capacities. Their pricing is yet to be announced.